A Darker White

The White Stripes : Get Behind Me Satan

Whatever else can be said about them; whatever hope can be expressed that the MTV set likes an ambitious, bluesy rock band; whatever complaint can be lodged about how the band's success might be affecting their work, The White Stripes know how to write a kick ass single.

De Stijl had “You’re Pretty Good Looking [For a Girl]”, White Blood Cells had “Fell in Love with a Girl”, Elephant had “Seven Nation Army”.

Get Behind Me Satan has “Blue Orchid”, a frenetic delta-blues-meets-butt-rock pot boiler that multi-tracks a massive guitar sound like if Billy Corgan produced a Judas Priest album. While up-tempo, the song is propelled by a bleak, venomous undertone the innocence-obsessed White Stripes have never expressed before. From vague foreboding at times to out and out betrayal, the dank corruption of adulthood pervades the entire album.

“The Nurse” intersperses fierce drum hits with calypso-inflected marimbas, alternating Caribbean rhythms with metal crunch, to drive home a simple point: When you’re at your lowest, beset on all sides with nowhere to turn [etc, etc], it’s the person you trust most who’s going to work that knife between your ribs. And twist.

The refrain, “I’m never gonna let you down, now,” isn’t at all convincing.

“Red Rain” nicely juxtaposes the sweet innocence of childhood [A la “We’re Going to Be Friends” and, really, all their previous work] with the bitter, gnarled mess of everything after.

You think not telling is the same as not lying, don't you? / Then I guess not feeling is the same as not crying to you

That’s a great couplet that balances outrage with naiveté very well. That tension, though, is present even at the level of instrumentation. As Jack sings “If there is a lie, then there’s a liar too / If there’s a sin, then there’s a sinner too,” Meg plays a set of children’s chromatic desk bells, sounding like those of a clock, signaling an end to blamelessness.

Jack White seems to view childhood not only as a time of innocence, but also of virtue and purity. Both the platonic friendship of “We’re Going to Be Friends” and the quaint love of “Fell in Love With a Girl” demonstrate this.

Here though, on “Passive Manipulation” that obsession turns straight creepy, as I suppose it was eventually bound to [call it Jackson’s Law]. It’s slightly ambiguous, but Meg seems to be singing out against Carl Jung’s Elektra complex, and also perhaps against its Appalachian corollary: dating within the family. I don’t know. Lyrics provided without commentary:

Women, listen to your mothers / Don’t just succumb to the wishes of your brothers / Take a step back, take a look at one another / You need to know the difference / Between a father and a lover.

Kudos for urging temperance, Meg, and for keeping the song under 30 seconds.

While the drumming is better than any of their other albums, Meg still couldn’t earn a seat at the kit of my seventh grade jazz band. Jack’s riffs, though, are percussive enough to pass, and adding elements like the marimba and those crazy bells to Meg’s percussion repertoire create enough novelty and depth to lighten the burden of her bratty cymbal-crashing.

I’m not sure who is responsible for it, but one of them knows how to shake a mean maraca.

The only other song that really would have benefited from some polishing is “Little Ghost”, a bluegrass caterwaul that really doesn’t fit with the rest of the record. A better context would probably be the b-side of Loretta Lynn’s “Portland, Oregon”, or anywhere on her gorgeously schizophrenic Van Lear Rose.

But even Ghost’s impromptu, back-porch ambience points in a good direction, toward a band that, having made a technically ambitious album in Elephant, is anxious to apply what they learned to churning out off-beat, ebullient, and densely emotional [if occasionally creepy] records.

All the best elements from De Stijl and White Blood Cells have returned from a short break [Elephant was mostly disappointing] with a new and intriguingly sinister pallor. The dissonant crunch of lost innocence has never been this much fun.